If ever there was a game in what’s been a horrendous season that sums up the entire campaign for Hull City , it was the 3-0 defeat to Birmingham City.

Back-to-back wins had seen confidence starting to creep back into this City side. The Tigers went into the game as favourites against a team without a win in eight games and looking like heading for relegation, and then against the odds, City serve up a shocker and lose.

I still feel City will stay up and the wins over Norwich City and Ipswich Town have put the Tigers in a strong position to do that. The thing is, had they won at St Andrew’s it would have been really hard to make a case for City being relegated.

After losing, there is still that doubt there because of the points dropped and the fact Birmingham are now just six points off City, but also because Nigel Adkins’ side again showed they are mentally fragile.

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This was a pressure game. The pressure was on because of what the win meant for City’s chances of staying up.

Adkins knew that and said after the game he’s spoken with his players about how important it was they got a win at St Andrew’s.

Time and again we have seen it and spoken about it, when the pressure is on this City side they all too often crumble. Mentally they’re just not strong enough and it’s cost them many times in games that you would have expected them to win.

Forget the fact City should have won. You lose games of football you think you should win, but let’s focus on the woeful display against Birmingham.

Craig Gardner of Birmingham City and Sebastian Larsson of Hull City during the Championship match at St Andrews

City have gone down by three goals and had it not been for Allan McGregor it could easily have been double that, maybe even more. Having beaten Birmingham 6-1 earlier in the season this could have been 6-0 and nobody would have been able to argue.

To go from two good performances and two big wins to that kind of performance just underlines the lack of mental strength in this side. That’s the concern for the rest of the season.

Sunderland are still too far adrift of City to catch them, Burton Albion don’t look capable of picking up enough points and I still can’t see City falling into that third relegation place, but there’s now an element of doubt when there didn’t need to be any.

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With games coming up after the international break against Aston Villa and then Wolverhampton Wanderers, a return of zero points starts to put the pressure back on the Tigers – especially if Birmingham take something from their next two matches against Ipswich Town and Bolton Wanderers, two winnable games now their tails are up and they’ve been given a shot of confidence. Or should I say handed a shot of confidence by City.

It wasn’t just that City missed a golden chance to make themselves virtually safe, it’s the fact they’ve given Birmingham a massive shot in the arm to take into their next run of games which all of a sudden for the Blues start to look far more winnable.

Where that woeful display came from even Adkins doesn’t know. There has been talk the head coach shouldn’t have changed a winning team, but that’s nonsense.

Hull City manager Nigel Adkins

Adkins made two changes in bringing Abel Hernandez and Ondrej Mazuch back into the starting line-up. I’d argue they were changes the majority of City fans would have made before the game, so it’s easy to look afterwards and say Adkins got it wrong. I don’t think he did.

The manager was honest in his assessment after the match which was also good to see.

He didn’t single any players out like after the Millwall loss, but he gave an honest account of his side’s performance and what went wrong and I was impressed by that, because this wasn’t a time to try and gloss over a display like that.

The big task the manager now has is to lift his side over the international break and make sure they’re switched on for the game with Aston Villa.